NEW YORK -- The massive eight-hour CBS mini-series, 'The Blue and the Gray,' won't air until Sunday night, but it already may be in trouble with Civil War buffs who fret over accuracy the way a mother frets over sick children.
'CBS wouldn't give us an advance screening,' said Michael R. Virgintino of the Civil War Round Table of New York. 'They say we're a special interest group.'
They are indeed. There are enough Civil War buffs in the United States to replace the Grand Army of the Republic and any one of them can tell you exactly how many threads were used to sew a button on a uniform.
They do not like liberties taken with their favorite war, and despite the hiring by Columbia Pictures of some of the sharpest experts in the field to keep an eye on the script, rumors of such liberties abound.
The Confederate Historical Institute in Little Rock, Ark., already has pounced on one such rumor -- an accurate one -- that has the hero of the piece first attending the trial of abolitionist John Brown, then witnessing the brutal lynching of a free black man.
'It seems to some of us, both northerners and southerners, that these two scenes may set the stage with the impression that slavery was the principal cause of the war, and especially that such hangings of blacks were typical events in the south,' the institute editorialized in a recent newsletter.
The institute complained that such sensationalism 'exacerbates present day racial tensions.'
Other buffs mutter that Columbia invented at least one battle for the series and placed fictional characters at real events in a such a way as to change their historical significance.
Since the controversy will glue every Civil War buff in the nation to his television set during the series, however, CBS can only profit. Letters of outrage after the ratings are in can be borne.
All of which has rival networks ABC and NBC worried.
What, after all, are they to do in the face of a blockbuster like 'The Blue and the Gray' when every rating point harvested during the November Nielsen sweeps period bears megabucks in advertising revenues?
They throw in naked teen-agers and the Man of Steel and hope for the best, that's what they do.
NBC will counterprogram the kickoff of 'The Blue and the Gray' Sunday from 8-11 p.m., EDT, with a reprise of the soggy Brooke Shields feature nudie, 'The Blue Lagoon,' while ABC hurls 'Superman' into the breach.
Civil War buffs notwithstanding, if either one drains an appreciable audience away from 'The Blue and the Gray,' then the Nielsen families truly are beyond redemption.
For the average television buff who yawned through the Civil War in American History class and settled for a C-minus, 'The Blue and the Gray,' which completes its run Tuesday from 9-11 p.m. and Wednesday from 8-11 p.m., is worth watching.
It is gigantic, brutal, bloody, heart-breaking and dramatic -- in short, everything that commands an American audience.
CBS claims making the miniseries was 'the most ambitious project ever undertaken by the network,' and it shows in terms of more than 250 speaking roles, 6,000 extras and 1,500 horses.
The cast of stars is cosmic, even in cameo -- Gregory Peck as Abraham Lincoln, Sterling Hayden as John Brown and Rip Torn as Ulysses S. Grant.
But it is to John Hammond, as a sensitive artist sent to cover the carnage as a sketch-pad war correspondent with friends and relatives on both sides, that the job of telling the story falls.
He tells it on a cinematic scale surpassing 'Gone With the Wind.'
Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman summed up the whole thing in three words.
'War is hell,' he said.
He was right, but owing to mankind's unceasing worship of the dark art, it also is great television, and no one at the network level yet has said that has to be accurate.
